Companies to Pay New Jersey $17 Million for Toxic Cleanup

By DAVID KOCIENIEWSKI

Published: November 13, 2003

JERSEY CITY, Nov. 12—
Three industrial companies have agreed to give the state $17 million to pay for environmental damage at hundreds of sites in northern New Jersey that were contaminated with the deadly chemical chromium, Gov. James E. McGreevey announced on Wednesday.

The legal agreement with the companies -- Honeywell International, Tierra Solutions and PPG Industries -- ends a 20-year legal battle between them and local communities where acres of land have been rendered unusable and groundwater has been tainted by chromium waste dumped from the 1890's to the 1950's.

Although the settlement provides only a fraction of the amount local officials had sought as compensation for the lost tax revenue and the cost of coping with the pollution, many environmentalists said they were heartened that the agreement would avoid further litigation and hasten the cleanup.

Mr. McGreevey went out of his way to congratulate the three corporations for agreeing to the settlement and warned other industrial companies that his attorney general was beginning an aggressive initiative to file civil lawsuits to recover damages from corporate polluters.

''We are holding corporate America responsible,'' the governor said. ''This should send a message to corporate polluters that you can run, but you can't hide.''

During its industrial heyday, North Jersey was home to at least three chemical plants that produced coatings for machine parts and created huge amounts of the byproduct hexavalent chromium, which can cause an assortment of health problems including lung and liver cancer. Some of the chromium-tainted material was pumped directly into the Hackensack River; and millions of tons of chromium-tainted earth was sold as landfill, and homes, businesses and even a drive-in theater were built on the sites, leaving Jersey City with some of the most polluted soil in the nation.

Last year, a federal judge ordered Honeywell to pay to clean up one 34-acre site, which will cost an estimated $400 million.

The payments in the settlement announced Wednesday will be in addition to that court-ordered cleanup, and will allow the communities to clean other polluted sites, create parks and wetlands and buy open space. One of the sites eligible for cleanup is a segment of Liberty State Park in Jersey City, where the governor and his advisers announced the settlement.

The size of the award, and the state's involvement, disappointed some local residents who have been fighting for decades for compensation from Honeywell. Gerry McCann, former mayor of Jersey City, said the state should pay to clean the park itself and give the $17 million to Jersey City residents who have had to contend with the pollution for decades.

''This settlement is nickels and dimes,'' Mr. McCann said. ''In taxes alone, we lost $50 million, because there was so much land that was left useless. When you add the cost of the water pollution, and health problems, this is really nothing.''

But Jeff Tittel, executive director of the Sierra Club's New Jersey chapter, said the administration had struck a reasonably good deal. Given the weakening of environmental laws by the New Jersey Legislature, and the legal stalling tactics that led a federal judge to chastise Honeywell, Mr. Tittel said, the state was wise to recover what it could rather than begin another round of tortuous litigation.

''Getting something is better than getting nothing,'' Mr. Tittel said. ''This is only a quarter or a fifth of what the true cost should be. But I think it may cause enough of an ouch to the industrial polluters to make them think twice.''